Monday, April 16, 2007

Dodgeball founders leave google

Dodgeball founders have left google. The concept behind dodgeball was quite interesting and was developed by college-going enthusiasts. It is a mobile social networking service which started with the service offering SMS whenever your friend is within some distance from you. It was an early concept and could have gone on to become what twitter is today. Unfortunately, the vision of its founders did not match with that of people at Google.

It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. (...) It wasn't worth being that frustrated all the time - it was making us both crazy.

Companies on similar concept are created a lot of media buzz these days. Such concepts can do wonders in India where mobile communication is creating the impact which internet created in developed world. Leaving google in such a manner also shows Google doesn't allow freedom to its engineers the way it did a few years ago.